Richard Swinburne - Alternative Concepts of God?

Is God, if there is a God, a personal, conscious, all-powerful Supreme Being? Some offer radically different concepts of 'God', exploring novel ideas of what God may be like. They challenge theism - the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - with radically new kinds of gods. Is this 'heresy'? Or enlarging our vision of what the Ultimate can be like?



Richard Swinburne is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[zhugh]

Swinburne sounds like the headmaster at a boys school in 1920's England.

[soubhikmukherjee]

Professor Swinburne is really really intelligent.

[ergodicmage]

This is not a video exploring the alternative concepts of god, instead it is this Swinburne rejecting the other concepts.

[BugRib]

Swinburne needs to play an imperial Moff in a Star Wars movie or show! The guy is simply an amazingly sinister--yet strangely likable--character.

Even if he just lends his voice to an animated show, I'd be happy!

Or he could play some kind of Sith metaphysician (or Darth Vader's personal astrologer). That would be cool, too!

[flowwiththeuniverse]

Sounds like walking into a supermarket and trying to choose what kind of potato chips i should buy!

[tekannon]

Dear Mr Khune and Mr Swineburn, Thank you Mr Khune for your videocasts. You pose excellent, well thought-out questions which make guests like Mr Swineburn give us explanations of high caliber. My thoughts of God go in all directions. I have a handicapped child hospitalized for life and one time on a train to a neighboring city in Europe, I spied a priest nearby and asked if I might sit opposite him which he accepted. I couldn’t keep it in me for long and when I recounted my back story and the sorry state of my only child and how my daughter was afflicted with an illness no doctor had a cure for, the priest said that God created her---my daughter---to be happy in her own way. He said all of the handicapped people seemed to have an innate happiness. I thanked him but I didn’t have the heart to tell him my kid had threatened suicide more times than I could remember. She’d say things like: “Why did you have a kid like me?” In short, I can’t bring myself to believe that a God would create the unhappiest child I have ever known. She doesn’t have a special happiness. I have lived a very hard drama since she became ill. I don’t say there isn’t a God. No; but I think we invent things we can’t explain and then dress them in clothes we can identify with so as to make life have meaning.

[paulyaron]

Interesting, a graduate class in philosophy condensed into 21 minutes

[quantumkath]

Worthy of watching again and again! Brilliant.

[ReformedR]

Swinburne is a genius may God bless him

[soodzy]

I've never really contemplated the idea of a "developmental" God. Raises alot of questions to ponder

[mehdibaghbadran]

God’s explanation is in different languages, that’s why, the others, cannot understand, from the beginning, but they effected slowly but stays longer!

[jean-pierredevent]

Anyone able to listen with full attention to this 20 min is already close to God

[jeremyduguay]

“only lies are unsolved, the truth speaks for itself“
“ it’s hard to see the truth when lies are what make you happy now”

[bazerwazer]

Does Richard Swinburne sound like he's just stepped out of the 18th century?

[domcasmurro]

Richard Swinburne and David Bentley Hart are some of the few religious minds that don't make me cringe into oblivion when i hear them.

[paulbrocklehurst]

I started to keep a tally of just how many untestable assumptions Swinburne made in his monologue, _but I ran out of paper._

[mehdibaghbadran]

Our lifetime is too short, but it doesn’t mean that, we have no time’s to learned fully from our lifetimes

[JustAThought]

As a starting point for discussions about God:

Universal God:

My thought: God is our explanation for the causation of reality.

Since we do exist in our reality and God is our vision for the creation of reality, then God does exist. We just do not have knowledge of the nature of God.

[YasirKhan-urom]

" Richard ! I have been bombarded with all different kinds of concepts of God."

[mindvulpen]

I could see mister Swinburne is fully emerged in his Judeo-Christian upbringing and cannot see passed its own loopholes only to point out the loopholes existing in other explanations. Interesting to listen to him none the less.